Raging Bull : Pierce’s Parker Channels Anger Into Punishing Running Style

In his mind they appear to be a blur, much like the yard markers he sweeps past on his way to the end zone on a Saturday night.

So LaShante Parker keeps running, perhaps hoping that the faster and longer he is able to run, the more hazy and obscure the who’s, whats, whens, where’s and whys of his past might become.

Heartache, he has learned, is a more formidable adversary than any hard-nosed linebacker. It doesn’t know a fair fight, which is why Parker prefers to wage his battles hand to hand, foot to foot, muscle to muscle and heart to heart.

“LaShante runs angry,” says Pierce College Coach Bill Norton, for whom Parker plays tailback. “To him, every carry is a physical challenge. In the open field, he’s not going to run around you. He’s going to run you down.”

Pierce’s nickname is the Brahmas and Parker, a 20-year old sophomore, provides the football team with its own raging bull. He is the leading rusher in the Western State Conference with 1,248 yards and 17 touchdowns in 181 carries.

While most running backs choose to duck and jab, Parker’s style is as direct as an overhand right.

In coaching vernacular, he is a north-south runner, one who drives through a hole with the front of his helmet and the tops of his knees.

“I like to bang,” he says. “I like the contact.”

Although only 5-foot-10, Parker is, at a solid 188 pounds, able to take a sticking and keep on kicking. He is naturally strong and fast, the only gifts bestowed on him by a father and mother who separated and gave him up for adoption when he was 3 years old.

Parker’s mother, whom he has not seen for 13 years, has nine other children. He maintains contact only with his sister, Tamie Parker, and his stepsister, Maxine Jones.

He never really knew his father, whom he believes lives in Chicago. Parker’s childhood was spent bouncing between various foster homes and county agencies in the San Fernando Valley and Palmdale.

By the time he was in the 11th grade, Parker had known five different homes. Most of the foster families, he says, were “in it for the money”--the monthly stipend they received from the county. But, he adds, “they were pretty cool to me.”

The Community Group Home in Palmdale, a boys’ home, provided another uncommon experience. Parker’s roommates were runaways, gang-bangers and kids fresh from doing time in Juvenile Hall.

“We had kids in there whose entire life was being a Crip or a Blood or an 18th Street Gangster,” says Shawn Caw, who along with his wife, Edith, served as “houseparents” in the home.

“LaShante could probably quote you their pledges and tell you about their initiations and everything else. Those kids were his friends. But he never got involved with their gangs.”

Football was Parker’s deliverance. He stayed at the home from the eighth grade through his sophomore year in high school, running and lifting weights with Caw, an avid sports enthusiast.

Caw learned of Parker’s athletic prowess first-hand, when he was defeated in a foot race.

“I trained all my life and am extremely fast,” says Caw, 32. “When he beat me I said, ‘This guy is going to be a pro football player.’ He just needed some training.”

Three times a week, Caw set aside time to work solely with Parker. “It was no secret that LaShante was my pet,” Caw says, “but there were things I knew I could do with him so he could help himself.”

At the same time, Caw says he grilled Parker about his schoolwork, alternately pleading with him and threatening him to keep up his grades.

“Physically, there were times I wanted to choke him,” Caw says. “I wanted him to know that if he could not compete with his grades, that all the running and hard work and discipline meant nothing.”

Ultimately, Parker learned that lesson the hard way.

At Palmdale High, he made the varsity football team as a freshman and three times was voted All-Golden League, playing tailback and inside linebacker.

But he also was declared academically ineligible to participate in the playoffs in both his junior and senior years. He never earned a diploma.

Intelligence was not the problem. Discipline was. Parker often skipped class, homework, or both.

He attributes his wayward ways to a lack of guidance. “I didn’t have nobody to push me. Nobody to tell me to do this or that,” he says.

Caw and several other people tried. John Lowery, Palmdale’s coach during Parker’s junior and senior years, says he had heart-to-heart talks with Parker on several occasions.

“He would listen and I think he was sincere,” says Lowery, now an assistant at Highland High, “but he just didn’t have the facilities or support at home.”

Norton, the Pierce coach, was the Palmdale coach when Parker was a freshman. He says Parker “is not incapable of learning. What he is, is stubborn. I really think he believed he could do what he wanted and stay eligible and get a scholarship anyway.”

But if Parker didn’t realize it before, he found out in the fall of 1989, shortly after his senior season of football, that academic shortcomings can nip a promising athletic career in the bud.

As a major-college football prospect he was above average in every way except when it came to grade points.

“There were Division I schools interested,” Lowery says, “but grades turned them off. Even at the time of their first inquiry (before Parker’s senior season) his grades were at the point where it was too late to catch up.

“LaShante understood the problem, but he had dug a hole so deep that the light was a long way at the end of the tunnel.”

Parker dealt with the disappointment in his usual way. He said little to anyone, choosing instead to hold in his emotions.

“What could I do? I messed up,” he says. “I was like, ‘Now what?’ ”

But it wasn’t even that simple. Parker was able to deal with past problems by letting his frustration out on an athletic field. Even if it was only practice.

He recalls once dislocating a teammate’s shoulder during a tackling drill. “When something happened I’d just tell myself, ‘I’m going to take it out on the football field,’ ” Parker says.

Now even that opportunity had been temporarily taken away.

Junior college football was the only option for Parker if he was to continue his career. So he sought help from Norton, for whom he had played one season at Palmdale.

Norton was now in his second season on Coach Bob Enger’s staff at Pierce, a school that in 1988 resurrected its once-proud football program. Norton was well aware that the Brahmas’ stock would rise with the addition of a blue-chip running back such as Parker, but before any commitment was made he posed a question.

“Are you going to make the same mistakes you made in high school and have people look at you like, ‘You did it again’?” Norton asked.

“No,” Parker said. “I know I’m going to have to work harder.”

And he has, although it hasn’t been easy. The work, Parker says, “is kind of difficult,” but the goal of going on to play football at a four-year school spurs him.

To be eligible to play at the NCAA Division I-A level Parker needs to complete 60 units and earn his Associate in Arts degree.

He says he is “on track” to do just that.

“Really, this is the key semester in his whole educational career,” says Norton, who became Pierce’s head coach after last season. “If he keeps the classes he has this semester and is relatively successful in them, then he will have shown he has grown and matured and now understands the means to the end he wants. He knows he has to be a student to get to a four-year college.”

Which is not to say Parker has become a serious student. Professional football does not have a minor-league system. If it did, Parker might not be toting around books as often as he does footballs.

He has no second choice when it comes to a career. Asked what he will do if football doesn’t work out he says, “Probably major in something. I don’t know. I’m undecided about that.”

Any hobbies other than sports and weightlifting? “No.”

But what he does possess is an uncanny ability to take pain and bitterness and channel it into bursts of strength and speed on the playing field.

Norton likes to recall a game last season in which Parker tripped on the cord of his coach’s headset as he started onto the field from the sideline. “He just ripped it right off my head and I’m screaming at him, ‘You idiot . . .’ and he goes 65 yards for a touchdown on the next play.

“He came off and was so mad all he could tell the running-backs coach was, ‘Let me see him yell at me now!’ I said, ‘Hell, if he’s gonna score every time I yell at him, I’ll start making up reasons to yell at him.’ ”

He need not always be so inspired. In the past three games Parker has rushed for 577 yards and 10 touchdowns. And suddenly, from the ashes, Pierce is one win shy of securing the championship of the WSC Southern Division.

The simultaneous emergence of Parker and Pierce is not a coincidence. The football field, Norton says, is the one place Parker feels he might have an advantage over most everyone else.

“It’s the same with a great artist,” Norton says. “What do they like to do? They like to paint or they like to draw. LaShante has physical strength, excellent balance and speed, and when he puts them together on the football field he is superior to other people. And he likes that feeling.”

Football is, by all accounts, the vehicle he uses to express himself. The field is a place where his troubles, for a time anyway, can be tucked away as neatly as the football under his arm.

“It’s like that’s his world,” says Maxine Jones, Parker’s stepsister who lives in Van Nuys and attends most of Pierce’s home games. “He knows it is his only way out, the only way he is going to do the things he wants to do.”

And for now at least, Parker is content with that. He detests the idea of being pitied. He is, he says, a young man who “got dealt a few problems” but has learned how to put together a winning hand.

He considers the trauma of his youth “over with. Done.”

“There’s nothing I can do about it,” he says, “except to go on living and do the best I can.”